Rationed

Writer’s experience dining in the Yugoslav People’s Army

In the days of my adolescence, my parents returned from work around 3:45 P.M., and the family dinner was held at four o’clock. The radio was always on for the four-o’clock news, featuring international disasters and domestic socialist successes. During the meal, my sister and I were subjected to an interrogation on school matters; we were never allowed to eat in silence, let alone read or watch television. Whatever conversation we could muster had to be terminated in time for the weather forecast at four-twenty-five; dinner was over at four-thirty, by which time we were obliged to have finished everything on our plates and to have thanked our mother for her efforts.

Although my sister and I were invariably given the biggest and best morsels, we experienced our family meals as a means of parental oppression. We always complained: the soup was too salty, peas were served too often, the weather forecaster was obviously lying. For the two of us, the ideal dining experience involved c´evapi (grilled skin sausages, a kind of Bosnian fast food), comic books, loud music, television, and the absence of our parents. It was only once I was in the Army that I grasped the metaphysics of family meals and understood that the food was prepared over the low but steady fire of love.

In October, 1983, at the age of nineteen, I was conscripted into the Yugoslav People’s Army. I served my time in Stip, a town in eastern Macedonia that was home to both the military barracks and a bubble-gum factory. I was in the infantry, where the main training method was a kind of ceaseless debasement that began with the way we were fed. At mealtime, we’d line up on the vast tarmac for roll call, then march into the cafeteria, unit by unit, where we’d slide our sticky trays along the rails, each of us trying to solicit bigger portions from the pitiless kitchen staff. Our menu choices were fantastically limited. For breakfast, we got a piece of dry bread, a boiled egg, a packet of rancid margarine, and occasionally a slice of gooey, unsmoked bacon; we washed it all down with tepid sweet tea or decondensed milk in plastic cups that had been absorbing grease for all eternity. Lunch always required the use of a spoon; our favorite dish was a thick bean soup—complete with tiny sprouts that looked exactly like maggots—because it was filling and set us up for an encyclopedia of fart jokes. Dinner consisted of modified lunch leftovers, unless it was lunch all over again, plus a cup of prune-based bowel-movement potion. There was never time for conversation; we had to devour the grub quickly and then make way for the next ravenous unit.

Those were the good meals. We longed for them after we were deployed to the arid Macedonian plains, where we rehearsed for battles and slurped indefinable concoctions out of canteens or munched on the contents of our M.R.E.s: stale crackers, ancient cans of tuna, impenetrable dried fruit. Perpetually hungry, I often recalled my family dinners before I went to sleep, constructing elaborate menus that featured roast lamb or ham-and-cheese crêpes or my mother’s spinach pie.

Besides tough-loving us boys into manhood, the Army was supposed to be one big family, a community bound by loyalty, comradeship, and sharing. But you never shared a goody-laden package from home or left any food in your locker; in military dorms, pilfering was encouraged as a form of preparation for pillaging in future wars. What you couldn’t eat alone you traded for clean socks and shirts, for an extra shower or a daytime fire-watch shift. Food was a survival commodity.

One soldier in my unit went on a hunger strike. The officers ignored him, assuming that he was bluffing. Like everyone else, he was required to be present for each roll call and the subsequent meal. Suddenly he had a lot of close friends who were eager not to let his food go to waste. After a while, he became too weak to walk; he had to be carried to meals by two soldiers. The lucky men fought over his boiled egg while he smiled with his eyes closed, his gaunt cheek laid on the table.

A few months after my conscription, my mother and sister undertook a two-day trip from Sarajevo to visit me. By then, I was deployed in Kicevo, in western Macedonia. The weather was dismal, so we spent the visit at their hotel. Mother had brought along a suitcase full of food: veal schnitzels, fried chicken, spinach pie, even a custard cake. She spread a towel on the bed, as there was no table, and I ate from plastic containers. The first bite of spinach pie—that sublime blend of spinach and eggs and phyllo pastry—brought tears to my eyes. ♦

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